Flagrancy

to Reason

after finishing "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" the section on the Congo is updated. Finally added an entry on South Africa that should have been in there a long time ago, along with asundry other coups, plots, and policies in Africa, most of them directly related, further reading no doubt required:

Until the anti-apartheid movement managed to change US policy through congressional pressure
in the late 80s - a policy change forcefully resisted by Reagan by veto, the rhetoric of
"constructive engagement",
and through the isolation of African states critical of the South African regime -
South African
apartheid formulated in 1948
received strong backing from Washington,
making South Africa a defacto client state over the course of the Cold War. At the same time
Washington was intermitently supporting different radical
"alternatives" to the ANC, which was also recieved occasional US funding,
in attempts to find an anti-apartheid movement that would take its orders from Washington.
A similar but shorter-lived situation existed in Rhodesia.

The South African regime used its generous assistance from Washington to
support incursions into neighboring states against
independent governments, targetting - among others - Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.

Known for using rape as an instrument of war,
the use of child soldiers, and assorted bloody atrocities, Renamo
invades Mozambique, starting a civil war (1976-1992) that killed some 1 million, primarily civillians,
and some 5 million were displaced.

The US indirectly supported Renamo through the US-supported Rhodesian
apartheid regime of the late 70s that originally formed the organization, and when
Mugabe took control and ended support for Renamo South Africa took over assistance programs, rapidly
growing the organization and escalating attacks on Mozambique.
This continued relatively unabaited until publicity of Remano's brutality
moved Washington to put pressure behind the 1984 Komati Treaty, a largely unsuccessful
attempt to curb South African destabalization of Mozambique, which continued covertly.
Remano received vocal support and financial assistance from numerous Western
conservative establishment
figures (e.g. Jesse Helms, Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, Pat Robertson)
and organizations (e.g. the Heritage Foundation - which hosted Renamo's Washington Office - and
the Scaife fund). Many intelligence establishment
figures were also tied to Renamo.

South Africa was never named a "state sponsor of terrorism", even after
Renamo was charged with genocide by Reagan's state department, after the destabalization
campaign had helped bring about a shift in Mozambique's political alliances towards the West.

Shortly after Samuel Doe's overthrow of a Liberian government ruled by a
colonialist oligarchy (descended from freed US slaves - alternatively supported and exploited
by the US) he becomes the recipient of $500 million in US support between 1980 and '85
despite gross human rights abuses and the creation of a military police state, almost
double the total US assistance Liberia recieved between 1962 and 1980.

During the 80s the US uses Liberia as a staging area for attacks on Libya,
and provides a glut of US arms that preface the
seven year anti-Doe insurgency in which hundreds of thousands were
massacred and some 800,000 became refugees and another million become internally displaced.
During the carnage the US blocked UN peace-keeping initiatives, refusing to contribute anything
to peace-making efforts until 1993.